At its most basic, historical ecology is about people and their interactions with the environment through time (Balee 1989, 1998, 2006; Balee and Erickson 2006b; Crumley 1994). Although the case studies presented here focus on the contributions of the archaeology of landscapes, historical ecology is inherently multidisciplinary with contributions from botany, zoology, linguistics, soil science, agronomy, anthropology, history, geography, ecology, genetics, demography, climatology, geology, soil science, and many other fields (for examples, Balee 1998; Balee and Erickson 2006a; Crumley 1994; Glaser and Woods 2004; Hayashida 2005).
In doing historical ecology of landscapes, archaeologists practice a form of reverse engineering. Recognizing fragmentary physical patterns in sites and landscapes as reflecting human culture, archaeologists carefully document and analyze the evidence within its temporal and spatial context for insights into original logic, design, engineering, and intentionality of human actions. Due to the incomplete nature of the archaeological record, interpretation relies on careful use of analogy to specific historical and ethnographic cases or general crosscultural models about human behavior. In the case of historical ecology, reverse engineering helps reveal the infrastructure and strategies of environmental management embedded in landscapes. Using this approach, historical ecologists can document and evaluate the successes and failures of human strategies through an examination of continuity and disjuncture in the archaeological record. Distinguishing between natural and cultural (or anthropogenic) processes of environmental change is possible with careful contextual analysis.
Traditional perspectives on human-environmental interaction separate and oppose people and nature. Humans are said to either co-exist in harmony with nature or overexploit and degrade nature. In cultural ecology, human ecology, cultural materialism, and evolutionary ecology, nature is a fixed given entity that humans interact with and adapt to and their success and failure are measured (Moran 1982; Sutton and Anderson 2004). In cultural evolution and cultural ecology, societies are assumed to pass through sequential stages of development from simple to complex. Increasing control of energy, elaboration of technology, population growth, and formation of political hierarchy are implicit to this lineal scheme as societies advance towards civilization. Differing degrees of human impact and transformation of the environment are attributed to each cultural evolutionary stage.
Band societies are assumed to have low or minimal impact while states are understood to have high impact (e. g., Redman 1999; Sutton and Anderson 2004).
In contrast to evolutionary approaches where natural selection and ecological processes determine the course of interaction of the human species and environments, historical ecologists propose that “the human species is itself a principal mechanism of change in the natural world, a mechanism qualitatively as significant as natural selection” (Balee and Erickson 2006b: 5). While not ignoring evolutionary and ecological processes, historical ecologists prioritize the historical processes, temporal and geographic scales appropriate for study of humans (often multiple), and human agency (intentionality, innovation, aesthetics, and creativity). Rather than “adapt” to an environment, humans practice resource management through which they create the environment in which they live. Balee defines resource management as “the human manipulation of inorganic and organic components of the environment that brings about a net environmental diversity greater than that of so-called pristine conditions, with no human presence” (1994: 117).
World History
